This morning I’m listening to the audiobook for Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song about Gary Gilmore—the guy who randomly murdered two people and requested to be put to death via firing squad.
At one point, in reference to his own sobriety, Gary informs a friend: Ah hell, that’ll last about as long as an ice cube up an asshole.
And I’m wondering what kind of in-depth investigative new journalism revealed this little nugget. Did Mailer scribble that on his notepad: ice cube up asshole.
Dialogue is slippery in nonfiction but the specificity of at that very moment (I’ve already forgotten the context), Gary Gilmore, who requested to be put to death via firing squad, having said verbatim, Ah hell, that’ll last about as long as an ice cube up an asshole.
I’ll be honest, I was a little disappointed when I googled Gary Gilmore and realized that Gary Gilmore only murdered two people.
Over a thousand pages dedicated to this guy (40+ hours of audiobook), I’m expecting that he would’ve at least racked up double digits.
Or maybe be as deranged as Ed Gein (pride of my homestate Wisconsin) who only killed two people but liked to dig up death masks from old graves and throw pity parties.
Plus I think I’d confused Gary Gilmore with Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, who killed at least 49 women we know of.
Then again, I've read about Gary Ridgway, and in terms of a literary character, Gary Ridgway is no Gary Gilmore.
Norman Mailer didn’t just write books. He wrote and directed movies. Starred in one.
He didn’t star in Tough Guys Don’t Dance but he directed it based on his adaptation of his own novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance.
It starred Ryan O’Neal.
At one point Ryan O’Neal’s character discovers that his wife has been cheating on him, and his response is: Oh God! Oh man! Oh God! Oh man! Oh God! Oh man! Oh God! Oh man! Oh God!
That is to say, Norman Mailer has quite an ear for dialogue.
Ryan O’Neal, who was mostly known for his estranged daughter Tatum O’Neal who was famous for being the tough girl pitcher in the Bad News Bears.
Ryan O’Neal who went on to date Farrah Fawcett and would later say—after Farrah Fawcett died of anal cancer—that he blamed his estranged daughter for it:
What bothers me the most, he tells Piers Morgan (a journalist after Norman Mailer's heart) is that there was turmoil during my love affair with Farrah, a lot of it caused by my family and my kids…. All of them, but particularly Tatum. And I just think that if she had never met us, would she still be alive today? Because nobody knows what causes cancer.
It’s not clear if this helped or hurt his desire to reconcile with his estranged daughter, but it does seem to hint at why he meshed so well with Mailer, whose own daughter wrote a memoir about what a narcissistic dick he was.
Mailer also wrote, directed, and starred in the movie Maidstone which revolves around a famous director (played by Mailer) who runs for president while everybody else he knows plots to assassinate him.
If you YouTube it, there is a video of Mailer, shirtless for some reason, getting punched in the face and then rolling around on the ground with his much smaller co-star Rip Torn.
As in: not part of the movie.
As in: not kayfabe (to borrow from wrestling parlance)
They were supposed to've been filming the final scene.
Here is the link to Rip Torn punching Mailer and then rolling around in the grass with him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AzmhorISf4.
Rip Torn of Men in Black fame—I & II, but not III, nor the shit show that was MIB International, which should not even be referenced as part of the original trilogy.
If you have ever read a book by Mailer, watched a movie by Mailer, or come across an interview with Mailer, it is quite rewarding to watch him—tubby and shirtless—get decked and then tackled by a smaller man named Rip. Last name: Torn.
In defense of Mailer’s overcompensating masculinity: Mailer does not in fact dance with Rip Torn.
He lies pinned to the ground in the arms of a man named Rip while Rip keeps saying: No baby, no baby. You know you trust me. You trust me… and then goes on to try to choke him out with his bare hands.
I’ve never actually seen Maidstone but I can’t imagine Mailer ever writing a better line of dialogue than that.
You of course were thinking that this would be about Mailer’s famous feud with Gore Vidal.
But that doesn’t involve tough guys. Or dancing.
Though it did, according to Mailer, involve him headbutting Vidal backstage at the Dick Cavett show. Alas no video has ever surfaced to validate Mailer making himself out to be a tough guy and picking on another smaller, more articulate man.
Mailer said that he got the title Tough Guys Don’t Dance from a story that he got from some boxer who heard the story from some other boxer about Frank Costello, an Italian crime boss of the Luciano family, telling a bunch of his hired boxers: Tough guys don’t dance.
Which makes you wonder if Mailer’d ever seen Muhammed Ali box or Lawrence Taylor do ballet?
But also makes you think: I’d pay to watch Rip Torn dance the lambada all over Norman Mailer’s fat ass all the night long.
After Gary Gilmore was convicted of killing his two people and was sentenced to death, he made a big deal about doing it quick and doing it big: No stays of execution, no appeals. Not even hanging was quick enough for Gary Gilmore (the only other option in Utah in 1977–the kinder gentler option).
Against Gary Gilmore’s wishes–this man that nobody could testify to a single redeeming character trait–the ACLU won him multiple stays of execution, not because they thought he wasn’t guilty or that he didn’t get a fair trial.
Rather on the grounds of mental competency: a sane man would not choose to be put to death, and definitely not as quickly as possible in as violent a way possible.
To which Gary Gilmore complained: They always want to get in on the act. I don't think they have ever really done anything effective in their lives. I would like them all—including that group of reverends and rabbis from Salt Lake City—to butt out. This is my life and this is my death. It's been sanctioned by the courts that I die and I accept that.
As you read Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song and then look at everything else he’s written or directed or acted in, it becomes quite clear that Gary Gilmore was a better writer/actor/director of his own life than Norman Mailer could’ve ever hoped to be.
Which, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that I’d rather read a bunch of books and watch a bunch of movies by a sociopathic wife-abusing murderer than Norman Mailer, but I’m also not not saying that I wouldn’t rather watch a documentary or read another book about Gary Gilmore saying Gary Gilmore things even after having already listened to 40+ hours of Executionor’s Song.
Maybe that says things about me that I’m not proud of admitting. My own toxic masculinity. Maybe this says things about our culture of glorifying facts about serial killers (most of them inarticulate and unintelligent men) over the art of a man considered one of the great American writers of all time.
But oh wait. What’s that you’re telling me? Norman Mailer stabbed his wife with a pen-knife and almost killer her? One of his six wives, with whom he had eight children, one of whom wrote a memoir about how traumatic it was to grow up his kid?
What's that? You're also telling me that his most famous essay was titled White Negro where he compared white hippies to not only slavery but also the plight of Jews from the Holocaust?
That Norman Mailer?
That’s the guy I’m worried about denigrating his artistic career?
Oh God! Oh man! Oh God! Oh man! Oh God! Oh man! Oh God! Oh man! Oh God!
Gary Gilmore’s last words before being shot by a five-man firing squad all aiming 30-30 Winchester rifles straight toward his heart from twenty feet away?
Let’s do it.
Now that’s a great goddamn line from a terrible man.
I read The Executiioner's Song back in the 80s, and my memory may be faulty, but Gilmore's death had a level of poignancy in that at the last moment when his family was saying their goodbyes in the prison, he tried to convince one of his family members to change clothes with him so he could attempt to slip away.